Little Boy Wears Blackface To School, Everyone’s Head Explodes

An 8-year-old in Colorado Springs dressed up as Martin Luther King Jr. for a school project, including painting his face, which I’m not even going to call blackface even though I know I called it blackface in the post title because that’s called JOURNALISM, but setting aside whether or not it was a wise decision, or whether or not his parents should have explained some things to him, he isn’t carrying on the long legacy of racial hatred in this country with his BOOK REPORT, but so he got kicked out of school and everyone’s head is falling off. There are people who support him, and people who think it was wrong. Supposedly the facepaint offended some students, which sounds like some bullshit. Other 8-year-olds got mad? No. Other 8 year olds were like “this glue tastes delicious.” 8-year-olds do not care about this stuff! If adults were offended, that almost makes sense, except that he’s just a child, and more importantly, he was ASSIGNED Martin Luther King Jr. I’m not really sure how you can even take a side. Oh, if you want him to stop wearing blackface to school, that seems REASONABLE to me. Maybe you could just explain why to him, though? Instead of claiming that facepaint is “against the school’s dress code,” because IS THE SCHOOL’S DRESS CODE THE PROBLEM? On the other hand, I’m not really sure how you can be “for” the kid either. You can understand where he was coming from, and see that there was no harm in it, but you can’t totally be like “FUCK YEAH, THIS KID!” There is, after all, a certain cultural background to this kind of behavior that is historically unpleasant even if he did not mean it in that way. I for real do not understand why no one seems to actually be talking to the kid about what this is even about. Poor kids. It sucks to be kids!

Thank God the local news team got to him before he washed his face, though. Otherwise this interview wouldn’t have won ALL THE PULITZERS:

He likes black people. He doesn’t want to hurt them. He was just trying his best. Don’t be afraid. Have a strong voice. Blackface. (Thanks for the tip, Jessica.)

It seems like white people under a certain age (let’s say 25) have completely forgetten why raceface is so unpleasant and why showing people you dressed up as Oprah for Halloween when you’re a blue-eyed redhead isn’t the greatest strategy of all time, for example. I honestly wonder where this ignorance is coming from.

This stuff is so frustrating. The social landscape is of course ever-changing, and certain words get new definitions or become broader terms for very specific things. I cannot stand the term blackface being such a blanket statement for these scenarios.

It’s apparently my own problem that I don’t feel the term is as universal as the rest of society, and that I mostly equate ‘blackface’ with its very speicific origins of racist minstrel shows and just racists in general playing BROAD stereotypes of black people, with giant white rings around their eyes and mouths and all that grotesque stuff.

But wearing make up to dress up as a very specific individual is not racist unless, for example, you’re saying you’re MLK and then start talking about how much you love things stereotypically related to black people (“I had a dream about watermelons” is an example of some racist-ass shit).

We’ve already touched on it in previous blackface-centric posts about how Fred Armisen is not of African descent but plays Obama every week on SNL. He’s wearing makeup and a wig. Where’s the outcry. Where’s the usage of ‘blackface’ when referring to his impression? ‘Blackface’ is not defined as ‘white people dressing up as black stereotypes.’ Any ethnicity can do blackface. Any ethnicity can do ANY-COLOR-face.

Yes, the denizens of the U.S. are predisposed to be very sensitive to the racial implications involved when depicting black Americans because of everything that came after enslaving them to build this nation, but that doesn’t mean that a kid is doing something racially insensitive by dressing up as a leader of the Civil Rights movement to champion his legacy. FUCK.

I really abhor the way our language is being used. I love how flexible and English is, where I can say “I’m photoshopping,” and people understand that ‘photopshopping’ isn’t actually a verb and in truth I am working on something in the Photoshop program. I just can’t stand how lazy people get with it, like attaching/attributing the most extreme words to the most minor things, such as putting ‘-Gate’ at the end of any minor conflict, every day on the news there’s a new declaration of war on something, etc.

I am willing to accept ‘blackface’ as a universal term for “the step someone who is not black must take in order to do an accurate portrayal of someone who is black through the process of applying makeup” as soon as the racial connotation is not implicit. Until that day comes, people who use ‘blackface’ as a catch-all term are using it wrong.http://i847.photobucket.com/albums/ab36/kajusx/imfinished.png

When we let the recess bell ring, when we let it ring from every hallway and every cafeteria, from every classroom and every school, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s kids, black kids and white kids, the kids who’s families don’t celebrate Christmas and those whose families do, bullies and nerds, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old spiritual, “Recess at last, recess at last. Thank God Almighty, we have recess at last.”

When I was around his age, I looooved Tina Turner. So, I dressed up as her for Halloween. Now I’m a pretty pale girl so I bought some dark foundation because I wanted to look like her. I had a sweet wig, a black dress and some rockin’ alligator boots with gold chains (which I don’t know that she ever wore but it looked very TT to me). Looking back, it probably wasn’t the best idea, but I was coming from a good place.

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